Familiar Light Through the Darkness
by Sakira Ashelforde
Summary: Kirihara Akaya awakens from a dreamless sleep to find himself unable to see, both figuratively and literally. He is lost in what could very well be his deathbed, and only then does the unwilling embodiment of the Devil realize just how much he loves the light that is his friends.
1. All Alone

**Disclaimer** : _The Prince of Tennis_ belongs to Konomi Takeshi.

Book cover by 15stepsdown

* * *

Akaya groaned as he struggled to sit up. Balanced on one arm, he touched his forehead with his other hand. It came away wet.

"What the . . .?"

He brought his fingers to his nose and inhaled cautiously. Akaya recognized the scent. The same liquid that was his inner Devil's favorite pigment to paint with was now dripping from his fingers. It was the same gory color he so often stained his opponents with.

Blood.

"Why . . .?" Akaya swiped at the steady trickle of warm, crimson liquid as it ran down his cheek.

"Mura-buchou, I'm bleeding!" Akaya whined automatically, always depending on his captain to help him, before he realized that he was cloaked in darkness.

Dark darkness.

Very dark darkness.

"Oh no."

Akaya's muscles reacted before his brain could, due to the lightning-quick reflexes he had developed through tennis, although the fact that his veins were coursing with adrenaline probably helped. He found himself involuntarily skittering backwards as fast as his arms and legs could carry him, to get away from what, he didn't know, just to get away.

Akaya didn't know how long he had crawled backwards for, whether it was hours or days or weeks or months or years, or perhaps merely minutes, even seconds. All he knew was that he suddenly felt very tired, and very thirsty.

He let out a gasp as his arms and legs finally gave out, dumping him onto his back, and knocking the wind out of his lungs. Akaya lay there, panting, slowly blacking out, his brain forming the most random and most useless thoughts as his mind started to cloud over.

 _I am Akaya Kirihara. I like cookies and chocolate. But only milk chocolate, not dark or white. Yech. I painted the walls in my room last night; they should be dry by now. And the custard in the miniature cakes at the bakery taste like bananas. I don't know why, they just do. I've never seen a lemming before. I wonder if they're cute and cuddly. Lemmings . . . lemmings . . . lemm . . . ings . . ._

Akaya tilted his head to the side, his nose picking up a new scent, different from the musty smell of wherever he was now.

 _Oh yeah, that's the cologne that Niou-senpai is always wearing for no good reason. He even tried to dump a whole bottle of it on me last week, but luckily I'm too smart to get tricked by him. Stupid cologne. Stupid Niou-senpai._

Akaya stopped rambling in his mind for a second, logic and sense slowly seeping back into his brain.

 _I can smell Niou-senpai's cologne? How? He's not here with me, or he would have whacked me on the head already and said something like "Hey, brat, what the hell do you think you're doing?" But, I'm sure I smell it. I'm sure. I'm 110% sure that's his cologne. But, if I can smell his cologne . . ._

Akaya sat bolt upright as his brain finally began to work properly again. Well, somewhat properly, anyway. This is Akaya, after all.

"Niou-senpai! Where are you?" Akaya yelled. Correction, tried to yell. It was more of a croak than a yelp, but you get the idea.

"Hold it!"

A muted crash, an "Oof!", and then a thump.

"Ow . . . Niou! Why don't you tell me you're going to stop before you stop, huh? Jeez!"

 _Marui-senpai._

"Shush! Did you just hear that?"

 _Niou-senpai._

"What're you talking abou-!"

A slap, like a certain silver-haired boy had just clapped his hand over the mouth of a certain redhead to keep him from speaking.

"Shut up for a sec, will ya?"

"Hear what? All I heard was you two getting ready to mutilate each other."

 _Jackal._

"I thought I heard my name . . . and it sounded like the brat."

"What, really?"

 _Yes, really._

"I doubt it. He didn't run off anywhere near here."

"Maybe he walked here? I remember he had two legs the last time I saw him. Don't you, Bun-Bun?"

"He was delirious! And at the other end of the school! You're saying he walked here while half-unconscious in 3 minutes?!"

"Yup."

". . . I knew I would get an answer like that."

"Well, if you knew, then don't ask!"

"Wait. Wait . . . Did you call me 'Bun-Bun'?"

"Mhmm. Gotta problem, Bun-Bun?"

"Not if you don't have a problem being known to the world as _Haru-chan_."

"Why, you li'l . . . !"

"Li'l what, huh? What're you gonna do about it?"

"Come on, guys, calm down! Niou, are you sure you heard Akaya?"

 _Yes, yes he did._

"Yes . . . no . . . maybe . . . so?"

A group sigh.

"Come on, let's just keep looking, he's bound to show up somewhe-"

"Waay aheead oof youu!"

Somewhere in a distant world far, far away from Akaya, rapid footsteps slapped against a tiled floor.

"Hey! Niou! Wait up!"

 _No! No! Don't leave me here!_

Akaya tried to clear his throat, but all that came out was a squeak.

 _Argh._

"Jack-ahh?" he got out.

"Hm?"

 _Yes!_

"Hey, Jackal! Come on!"

"Um . . . oh, coming!"

 _Funny,_ Jackal thought as he ran to catch up with Niou and Marui. _Did I hear Akaya just now?_

 _Didn't Jackal hear me just now?_

Akaya had been listening intently for Jackal's anticipated response, sitting on his knees, hands clutched in front of him, but after straining his ears for a good five minutes, Akaya finally slumped down to lie on the floor, his neck and back aching from staying in the same position for so long.

 _What should I do now? Jackal, Marui-senpai, and Niou-senpai left me here. I can't see, and I feel like passing out. In fact, why shouldn't I? What's to stop me from just lying here, and . . ._

Akaya gulped.

 _And what? Sleeping? Fainting? Dying? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know . . ._

Akaya lay there, his arms and legs sprawled out across the floor, his breathing deep yet ragged. The blood that had been trickling steadily from the cut in his forehead had now dried, and was sticking strands of his hair to his cheek. Akaya lifted a trembling hand to his face and managed to yank the strands from the congealing blood's grip. Then he just lay there.

Out of nowhere, a thin, wailing sound came from the darkness, and Akaya felt a stream of warmth crawling down the side of his face to the floor. Akaya was startled by the proximity of the noise, and the discomfort from the warmth, before realizing the wails were being produced by him.

Which only made him more startled.

 _Am I crying? Why am I crying? I'm not supposed to cry. Didn't I swear to myself to never cry out of defeat again? Not until I've beaten the Three Demons will I ever cry again. That's what I promised myself, right? Then what am I doing now?_

Akaya smiled a sad, sad smile.

 _It's because I'm weak. I'm pathetic. I'm useless to not just Rikkai's invincible tennis team, but to myself too. If I wasn't, why am I here? In this blackness, when I should be out there, with them, conquering the world? If I had any brains I would have gotten myself out of here by now. But, I don't know how to get out and no one is coming. No one is coming to help me. Nobody is coming . . . I'm all alone . . ._

Akaya's breathing had gotten shallow, and the sobs were not helping, as they forced wave after wave of tears from his eyes. Reduced to breathing in gasps, he gritted his teeth in an effort to stem the flow of tears streaming down his cheeks. As he did, the salty river of misery mixed with the dried blood still smeared across his face, and when Akaya tilted his head out of defeat, the bloody drops trickled into his mouth. Salty from the tears, metallic from the blood, the crimson drops brought Akaya back from the edge of hopelessness.

 _Okay,_ he thought to himself, doing his best to spit out the few specks of blood that had made it past his lips. _Okay, so I'm still alive. If I'm still alive, it's too early to give up. There's got to be a way out of this hellhole. All I have to do is find it. Okay, Akaya, up and at 'em. Let's go, let's go!_

In response to his own pep talk, Akaya managed to sit up. He carefully raised himself into a crouch and from there, he stood up shakily.

"Okay." Akaya took a breath. "Okay, okay, okay. So far, so good . . ." He paused, hands on his knees. _Now what?_

 _Listen up, Akaya. You heard Jackal and he heard you, so surely he must have been close by, right? So, all you have to do is find out which direction his voice was coming from and walk in that direction, right? I mean, if you do, you'll find some sort of door or wall eventually, right?_

"Yeah," Akaya grumbled to himself, giving his mental conscience a mental slap on the head. "Eventually I'll find something, _right_?"

"It's not as if I have a better idea though . . ." Akaya gave his arms a little stretch. "Now . . ."

Akaya put a finger to his chin. "Um, so if I'm facing this way now, my head would have been pointing in the opposite direction when I was lying down. Since I didn't change the direction I was facing when I lay down, I should still be facing the, um, original direction I was in when I woke up. Then, um, that would mean that to find Jackal's location when I heard him would be to go . . . straight, maybe?"

Akaya took a careful step forward, then another, then another still. As he walked farther and farther, he realized that instead of getting more and more tired as he trudged on, his heartbeats were actually becoming more even. His brain was beginning to clear up, and his muscles relaxed and gained better coordination, bit by bit, as Akaya walked.

"Huh," he murmured, pleasant bafflement in his voice. "I guess running all those laps that Fukubuchou, or rather, Niou-senpai-in-disguise-as-Fukubuchou assigned was worth something after all."

Akaya stilled his step for a moment.

 _Will I ever run those laps again?_


	2. In Darkness Again

_I'm walking, walking, walking…_

Akaya sucked in an impatient breath.

 _And I'm walking some more._

"Seriously, how much longer will this take?" he grumbled, stomping his feet with each step, the soreness imbedded in his limbs momentarily forgotten as his childish mind threatened a tantrum.

"Well, at least I'm more 'rational' now, as Yagyuu-senpai says. This would have been way harder to deal with if I wasn't, not that it's a simple matter to search-and-rescue myself in the first place…"

 _Back when Mura-buchou used to make us do 'team activities' together, God forbid that he still does, he once 'insisted' that we go to this homemade haunted house thing. Turns out he was the one who 'made' the haunted house, even though he managed to 'convince' Fukubuchou to 'help' him. Basically, all they did was set up the inside of Mura-buchou's garage so that it was really, really dark. They had a bunch of string hanging from the ceiling that would wave around and brush our faces, and of course, since this is a Mura-buchou activity, there's has to be a little sadistic twist included._

 _Apparently, all we had to do was walk through his 'haunted garage' from one end to the other until we found the door. But the instant we were all in the room, Mura-buchou slammed the door shut from the outside and it was pitch black. Fukubuchou hammered the door with his fist, but it was locked._

 _No duh._

 _Then, Niou-senpai, of course, started making these creepy ghost sounds while I yelled at him to stop. Marui-senpai started laughing at my obvious fear, Fukubuchou was hollering at us to shut up, and Jackal was trying to keep me from scratching Niou-senpai's eyes out. Suddenly, everyone fell silent, and I was completely alone in the dark._

 _I don't know how long I was in there for, but I remember swinging my arms around in an effort to find somebody and trying not to start bawling my eyes out. Yelling stuff like "This isn't funny!" and "When I get out of here I'm going to kill all of you!" like I was a lunatic, all the while panicking on the inside._

 _I was never very good at keeping my head together, that was always Yanagi-senpai's or Yagyuu-senpai's job. I was not the kind of person to keep my feelings hidden, and being trapped in oblivion was no exception. I screamed and cried and cursed at the blackness, so pure that I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face, threatening the people that, for all I knew, weren't even listening to my wild rants. Now that I think about it, I probably screamed enough for me to lose my voice, but at that time I didn't care._

 _That was the first time I truly recognized the significance of the term 'blind fear.'_

 _Don't ask me how, but I eventually found myself quietly standing still, making no effort to get out of that hell. I was so stunned and, both emotionally and physically, so exhausted as to have been beyond physical movement. Only my brain whirled as human feelings came, having been buried by fear. The first emotion I managed to identify had been betrayal. Why had the people I called my teammates, my peers, my friends, left me here? A moment later, in rushed hurt, frustration, and anger. People say I'm hot-headed, that I can't control my rage, and that I'm an overgrown child. I don't deny those claims. Yet, it was in what I had truly believed to be my deathbed, I experienced the first time I had mastered my wild emotions. I forced the fire from my chest down into my belly and poured liquid ice onto it, completely smothering the rising heat. Breathing hard, I had sat down, hugging my knees. Eyes wide open or shut tight, it didn't matter._

 _Sometime after I calmed down, a thin streak of light broke the utter darkness I was slowly suffocating in. The crack opened up wider and a mass of silhouettes became visible. By then, I was squinting and confused, not comprehending that running to the figures was my escape and was what I had been expected to do. After several seconds of staring, I had all but decided to turn my head away from the brightness and curl up again when Niou-senpai spoke, his voice lilting oddly._

 _"_ _Akaya? You coming out?"_

 _At his voice, something in my brain snapped and then I was hurtling towards them. The light was blinding, but I didn't care. All along in the darkness, I had been planning to strangle the first person I saw if I ever got out, but when it actually happened, all I could feel was relief._

 _"_ _Good job, Akaya," Yanagi-senpai said, giving me a small pat on the head. He saw the puzzled look on my face and rushed to explain._

 _"_ _You see, trapping you in the garage was actually an experiment of sorts. A few days ago, Seichii was saying how, despite his usual opinion of your usual Devil-like brutality as…"_

 _Yanagi-senpai gave a small cough._

 _"_ _Well, liveliness, he would like to see your rabid energy be turned down just a notch. The club could do without the surplus of broken rackets lately. Wouldn't you agree, Buchou?"_

 _"_ _Yes, of course," Mura-buchou replied, smiling his dangerous smile._

 _"_ _Ahem, well then," Yanagi-senpai stuttered slightly, obviously feeling nervous in that way that only Mura-Buchou could make us feel. "Even though Niou, Marui, and Kuwahara were the ones responsible for setting you up, I do indeed admit that I was the one to initiate the idea."_

 _"_ _Not that we would have refused, ya know," Niou-senpai snickered. "Givin' you a good scare without havin' the Fukubuchou on our backs, now that's fun."_

 _Marui-senpai nodded tentatively along to Niou-senpai's words._

 _I stared blankly at the wall behind Niou-senpai, processing the words. After a long delay empty of conversation, I opened my mouth._

 _"_ _Wait . . . what did Jackal have to do with locking me up?"_

 _"_ _Oh, I'm sorry, Akaya," Jackal said hurriedly. "Remember how I was trying to calm you down? I was actually covering your eyes so you couldn't see Yukimura-buchou opening the door to let us out. I spun you around to face the other way by pretending Niou was pushing you."_

 _Jackal was biting his lip nervously._

 _"_ _All according to my plan, of course," Yanagi-senpai added quickly, as if to take my attention off of Jackal's confession. I remained silent, thinking._

 _"_ _If you had expected me to bite your head off, Yanagi-senpai, you were wrong, for once," I said slowly, and then broke into a grin. "But congratulations. The experiment was a success."_

Akaya reemerged from his memories, prompted back into reality by the faint tugging sensation at the corners of his lips. His eyes widened as he registered that he was smiling. Here he was, trapped in oblivion, with no food, water, or an escape route, and he was smiling. Happiness was the last thing Akaya thought he would experience at a time like this, but the warmth filling his chest, the slight ache trembling in his heart, and the small tremors of energy that crawled along his shoulders were oddly reminiscent of joy. At first Akaya merely basked in the wonderful warmth of it, but soon grew conscious of the other emotion bordering, and slowly eroding, the happiness. The comforting heat was overflowing, the ache escalating to throbbing pain, and the drops of electricity becoming spikes.

Akaya stopped walking, his hands shaking as he clutched the spot over his heart. The comfort he had been enjoying moments before had turned into hurt; raw emotion searing away the thin coating of joy to reveal longing, desperation, and, very faintly, regret.

"What is this?" he growled as his pulse resounded in his chest, each beat pumping static through his veins. "Since when did being in darkness for too long make your heart ache?"

Akaya stilled, even though his nerves still buzzed with fire. His hands fell numbly to his sides, as his own words dawned on him.

 _I'm feeling heartache._

Akaya almost laughed; the sentence sounded so out-of-context and didn't seem to make any sense with his circumstances. Wasn't heartache the emptiness you feel when a loved one passes away before you get to tell them everything you had been too stubborn to say before? When the girl you liked since childhood rejects you for a man you know is obviously better for her than you? When you leave your family home to begin a life that you have wanted for years but don't want once you have it? When you are separated from people who you quietly love and who quietly love you without ever admitting it? People like brothers, sisters, teachers, friends…

"Oh."

Akaya let the sound slip out of him, his shoulders slumping in realization, the burning sensation fading at his comprehension.

 _So that's what it was. I miss my friends. It's as simple as that. Well, it's not like there's any reason for me not to miss them… I guess I have always had some degree of dependence on them, even when I don't listen to them and cause trouble. I guess, now that I'm separated from them, I'm realizing what their presence was and their absence is. I suppose when I get out of here that I should tell them as much… that I'm glad they care for me… that I'm useless without them…_

Akaya suddenly straightened up, his hands snapping him out of his confidence-destroying session by plastering themselves to his face with considerable force. He blinked hard, willing himself to register the pain of the red marks left on his cheeks and to push his doubts to the back of his mind.

"Sure, I might have been useless before, but if I can get out of here on my own, then I won't be so dependent anymore, will I? Besides, I'm sure the guys are just as worried about me as I am about myself, so why not do them a favour and put their minds at ease? Fukubuchou must be so angry… I hope he isn't frowning or he'll get lines on his face and he'll look old…"

Akaya laughed quietly at the thought and, relieved of heavier emotions, used the light confidence from his pep talk to continue his journey to who-knows-where. As he walked, he stretched his arms above his head, working out their stiffness. When he let them fall back to his sides, his right hand brushed against something just above Akaya's head, which he promptly leapt away from, uttering a tiny shriek.

Akaya stood still, with his hands guarding his face, for a good three minutes out of fear.

Finally gathering his courage, Akaya tentatively reached back out into the darkness until his fingertips touched the 'thing' again. It was cold and smooth, and seemed to curve away from Akaya at the top and bottom. He ran his hand against it, noting that, horizontally, it continued farther than he could reach without moving. He relaxed, shaking his head at his irrational fear.

 _As far as I can tell, this is some kind of pipe, the kind used to transport water or something. Where the heck am I, if I can run into something like this? Oh well, doesn't matter. It's possible that if I follow this thing, I can find the walls of this place, and then from there, a door. What have I got to lose? I was walking without much of a lead, anyway._

His mind made up, Akaya began to walk, his index finger trailing along the length of the pipe in order to keep him on track. After a few moments, he let his hand drop, both because of the consistency of the pipe's presence and because of the dust that had been accumulating on his fingertip. Every once in a while, he would poke at the pipe to ensure that his one indicator of logical direction in a world of darkness remained by his side.


End file.
